Research

My Master's thesis is based on the Gus Schema Browser, but I do have several other interests. I am curious with the Semantic Web, specifically ontology creation and visualization, as well as adding semantics in the legal domain. I am also fascinated with Web Services, in particular their creation, deployment, and monitoring. In the past, I worked as a research assistant under Dr. Eileen Kraemer, to whom I am very thankful for giving me such a great opportunity to develop my skills and broaden my knowledge in the area of computer visualization. Under her supervision, I continue to learn more about bioinformatics and JSP development. She is my major professor under whom I am currently working on my Master's thesis.

Previously, I worked as a graduate worker/researcher for Dr. Chris Cieszewski in the Fiber Supply Assesment area. I am also grateful to him for giving me such a great opportunity to further my experience and skills. While working for him, I worked as a programmer, analyst, and database administrator among my many responsibilties. During this time, I worked to maintain the group's servers and operating systems, combatted internet hackers, debugged code, and performed product testing. The experience I gained was truly invaluable and should help me throughout my career.

The following describes some projects that I am working on or have done in the past:

ApiDB: Accessing data from PlasmoDB, TCruziDB, CryptoDB, and other GusDB applications through one portal.

This work was done when I was a research assistant for Dr. Kraemer in the development of the ApiDB and the CryptoDB websites. ApiDB attempts to create one common portal for accessing several existing GusDB applications. It will make use of JSP and Web Services. The project is being funded by a contract with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. These applications involve bioinformatics and contain data dealing with disease-causing pathogens. To know more about the project, read the following article from the Red and Black: "Univ. to make genetic database"

Semantic Association Processing in a Distributed Environment

The Semantic Web promises an extension of the current Web in which all data is annotated with meaningful metadata, which allows for a more intelligent and automated web through machine understanding of data. Ontology provides a means of explicitly representing knowledge and has emerged as the choice way to represent metadata on the Semantic Web through serialization in some representation language such as RDF. Ontologies contain many entities interconnected with relationships. These relationships give the potential to query for complex relationships between resources. For example, we may want to answer the query, "how are resource A and resource B related?" Several researchers have proposed a set of operators based on the graph data model of RDF for such relationship queries. They define a Semantic Association as a complex relationship between two resources, and introduce an operator ρ for querying Semantic Associations. One such operator is ρ-path. Two resources A and B are ρ-path related if there exists a path from A to B in the RDF graph.

Semantic Web for Law: Lending Meaning to Ruling

This project attempts to add semantics to improve searching for legal documents. The goal of the project is an application that will, to the user, act initially like other search engines. A search term is entered and possible case results pertaining to the search term are returned. The user is then free to select from among the case results that are displayed. Once a case is selected many of the similarities to a search engine will disappear. Selecting a case will produce a “logic tree” of reasoning. This “logic tree” will take on a tree structure with the selected case at the root and related cases fanning outwards from it downwards to some “atomic case” level. Here “atomic cases” will generally end up being law (as law is voted upon and passed and often serves as the rational for a ruling) or seminal cases whose rulings have become a sort of law. The “logic tree” itself will contain differing links among its child nodes; these links will range from “cited in decision” to “is similar to” and will all be part of the legal history and rational for a decision.

Web Service annotation and Protocol design

As the popularity of web services increases there needs to be a more efficient way to discover services than the current keyword searches. One step towards achieving this goal is to create ontologies for web services, web processes and the relations between them, then annotate the web services with metadata to associate them with an ontology. This will aid in web services discovery and web process creation. Work has already been started in the area of ontology creation and web service annotation. This project proposes to expand the ontology designed by the Meteor-S project, as well as create an annotation tool to be used with Eclipse, a popular open source development tool. We will also develop a flexible protocol for specifying web service dependencies.